Tatyana Yushmanova lives and works in Moscow, but she looks for inspiration in the place where she had spent her childhood - a remote village in the Yaroslavl Region. Notwithstanding that she was born in the family where everybody were mathematicians and physicists, she graduated from the Moscow Academic School of Art and the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Mainly she paints landscapes of Russian nature and portraits.

Hi, Arch. I can’t travel. I’m an exploited worker under a capitalist system. You come on down here and say the word “union” and in five min. you’ll be tarred and feathered and tied up on a railroad track on the city outskirts. I get all my worldview reading.
And I have to say: The record on Lenin is mixed, but he was NOT a dictator. Most people can’t distinguish Communism from Stalinism, but the truth is: Stalin destroyed the Bolshevik Party (and the Bolsheviks) and Soviet Communism. After Stalin, the “old men” who ran the country were too vested to return to the 20s. Only Kosygin and Andropov were progressive, but they were harnessed or too ill to implement their changes.
And about Amer. unions: They were too conservative. Only in the late 1800s up to the I.W.W. were there elements of Marxism. The “commies” in the unions of the 30s and thereafter were duped by Stalin and Stalinism.

Hey, Sov I am sorry to hear that you are unable to travel. Perhaps someday you may. I didn’t make it to Moscow till I was 40, so, there is always hope. I struggle against a corporate giant everyday. It makes my flesh crawl when I hear people say we don’t need unions in this country anymore, when did justice and equality finally prevail? I must have missed it.

As far as Lenin is concerned it is my belief that he is permitted much slack on the behalf of modern socialists trying to vindicate their ideology. I do not accept the “bad Stalin” argument on the grounds that Lenin was fundamental in creating a system that permitted a thug like Stalin to rise to the top in the first place. No framework for the peaceful transfer of power was ever implemented, thus, you had the political mess that was the USSR and which ultimately lead to its doom. This failure was the main flaw. If it weren’t for victory in WW2, the USSR would have gone bust well before 1991. This PTOP issue is not necessarily socialist in nature, it is very much Russian. However, the “enlightened communists” who came in 1917 were supposed to fix these things, they did not.
Marx died in 1883, Sov, so, when should have Marxism come into play with American unions? Surely, not before then.